CHAPTER XII
THEY were at their table in the far corner of the bar, where the Colonel had both his flanks covered, and he rested solidly against the corner of the room. The Gran Maestro knew about this, since he had been an excellent sergeant in a good company of infantry, in a first-rate regiment, and he would no more have seated his Colonel in the middle of a room than he would have taken up a stupid defensive position.
“The lobster,” the Gran Maestro said.
The lobster was imposing. He was double the size a lobster should be, and his unfriendliness had gone with the boiling, so that now he looked a monument to his dead self; complete with protruding eyes and his delicate, far-extended antennae that were for knowing what rather stupid eyes could not tell him.
He looks a little bit like Georgie Patton, the Colonel thought. But he probably never cried in his life when he was moved.
“Do you think that he will be tough?” he asked the girl in Italian.
“No,” the Gran Maestro assured them, still bowing with the lobster. “He’s truly not tough. He’s only big. You know the type.”
“All right,” the Colonel said. “Serve him.”
“And what will you drink?”
“What do you want, Daughter?”
“What you want.”
“Capri Bianco,” the Colonel said. “Secco and really cold.”
“I have it ready,” said the Gran Maestro.
“We are having fun,” the girl said. “We are having it again and without sorrow. Isn’t he an imposing lobster?”
“He is,” the Colonel answered. “And he better damn well be tender.”
“He will be,” the girl told him. “The Gran Maestro doesn’t lie. Isn’t it wonderful to have people who do not lie?”
“Very wonderful and quite rare,” the Colonel said. “I was thinking just now of a man named Georgie Patton who possibly never told the truth in his life.”
“Do you ever lie?”
“I’ve lied four times. But each time I was very tired. That’s not an excuse,” he added.
“I lied a lot when I was a little girl. But mostly it was making up stories. Or I hope so. But I have never lied to my own advantage.”
“I have,” said the Colonel. “Four times.”
“Would you have been a general if you had not lied?”
“If I had lied as others lied, I would have been a three-star general.”
“Would it make you happier to be a three-star general?”
“No,” said the Colonel. “It would not.”
“Put your right hand, your real hand, in your pocket once and tell me how you feel.”
The Colonel did so.
“Wonderful,” he said. “But I have to give them back you know.”
“No. Please no.”
“We won’t go into it now.”
Just then the lobster was served.
It was tender, with the peculiar slippery grace of that kicking muscle which is the tail, and the claws were excellent; neither too thin, nor too fat.
“A lobster fills with the moon,” the Colonel told the girl. “When the moon is dark he is not worth eating.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I think it may be because, with the full moon, he feeds all night. Or maybe it is that the full moon brings him feed.”
“They come from the Dalmatian coast do they not?”
“Yes,” the Colonel said. “That’s your rich coast in fish. Maybe I should say our rich coast.”
“Say it,” the girl said. “You don’t know how important things that are said are.”
“They are a damn sight more important when you put them on paper.”
“No,” the girl said. “I don’t agree. The paper means nothing unless you say them in your heart.”
“And what if you haven’t a heart, or your heart is worthless?”
“You have a heart and it is not worthless.”
I would sure as hell like to trade it in on a new one, the Colonel thought. I do not see why that one, of all the muscles, should fail me. But he said nothing of this, and put his hand in his pocket.
“They feel wonderful,” he said. “And you look wonderful.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I will remember that all week.”
“You could always just look in the glass.”